Gordon Parks: the Atmosphere of Crime 1957
Gordon Parks: the Atmosphere of Crime 1957

Author: Sarah Meister

Publisher: Steidl

Published: 2020-03-31

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9783958296961

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Gordon Parks' ethically complex depictions of crime in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with previously unseen photographs When Life magazine asked Gordon Parks to illustrate a recurring series of articles on crime in the United States in 1957, he had already been a staff photographer for nearly a decade, the first African American to hold this position. Parks embarked on a six-week journey that took him and a reporter to the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike much of his prior work, the images made were in color. The resulting eight-page photo-essay "The Atmosphere of Crime" was noteworthy not only for its bold aesthetic sophistication, but also for how it challenged stereotypes about criminality then pervasive in the mainstream media. They provided a richly hued, cinematic portrayal of a largely hidden world: that of violence, police work and incarceration, seen with empathy and candor. Parks rejected clichés of delinquency, drug use and corruption, opting for a more nuanced view that reflected the social and economic factors tied to criminal behavior and afforded a rare window into the working lives of those charged with preventing and prosecuting it. Transcending the romanticism of the gangster film, the suspense of the crime caper and the racially biased depictions of criminality then prevalent in American popular culture, Parks coaxed his camera to record reality so vividly and compellingly that it would allow Life's readers to see the complexity of these chronically oversimplified situations. The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 includes an expansive selection of never-before-published photographs from Parks' original reportage. Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African-American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

Gordon Parks: Segregation Story. Expanded Edition
Gordon Parks: Segregation Story. Expanded Edition

Author: Peter W. Kunhardt Jr

Publisher: Companyédition Steidl/The Gordon Parks Foundation

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783969990261

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Includes several previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks's original transparencies.

Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute
Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute

Author: Hamish Bowles

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1647000777

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An updated and expanded edition, covering the past five years of the Met Costume Institute’s exhibitions and galas through the lens of Vogue The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibition is the most prestigious of its kind, featuring subjects that both reflect the zeitgeist and contribute to its creation. Each exhibition—from 2005’s Chanel to 2011’s Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and 2012’s Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations—creates a provocative and engaging narrative drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors. This updated edition includes material from 2015’s China: Through the Looking Glass, 2018’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history), and 2019’s Camp: Notes on Fashion. The show’s opening-night gala, produced in collaboration with Vogue magazine, is regularly referred to as the party of the year, and draws a glamorous A-list crowd, drawing an unrivaled mix of Hollywood fashion. This updated edition of Vogue and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute once again invites you into the stunning spectacle that comes when fashion and art meet at The Met.

Transparencies
Transparencies

Author: Stephen Shore

Publisher:

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 9781912339709

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'Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979' offers an alternative account of one of the most fabled episodes in photographic history: the cross-country journeys that produced Stephen Shore's luminous new vision of the American landscape, 'Uncommon Places'. Along with his large-format camera, Shore also brought a 35mm Leica on his travels. The images made with it, on luminous colour slide film, are intimate, spontaneous and personal, while retaining Shore's studied formal sensitivity. In these entirely unseen photographs, a parallel iteration of an iconic vision emerges like a piece of music played in a new key. The vocabulary is familiar: highways and homes, phone boxes, fast food and sun-strewn parking lots. But the alternative format unmistakably re-envisions these subjects through distinct experiments with composition, attitude, and colour. Transparencies uncovers both a detail-oriented survey of the American landscape of the 1970s and a rigorous, imaginative exercise in form by an undisputed modern master. With an afterword by Britt Salvesen, curator at LACMA, titled 'Ordinary Speech: The Vernacular in Stephen Shore's Early 35mm Photography'.

Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks

Author: Russell Lord

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 9783869307213

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This volume explores the making of Gordon Parks' first photographie essay for Life magazine in 1948, "Harlem Gang Leader". After gaining the trust of one particular group of gang members and their leader, Leonard "Red" Jackson, Parks produced a series of photographs that are artful, poignant, and, at times, shocking. From this large body of work (Parks made hundreds of negatives) the editors at Life selected twenty-one pictures to print in the magazine, often cropping or enhancing details in the pictures. Gordon Parks : The .Making of an Argument traces this editorial process and parses out the various voices and motives behind the production of the picture essay. This volume. together with an exhibition of the same name at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA), considers Parks' photographic practice within a larger discussion about photography as a narrative device. Featuring vintage photographs, original issues of Life magazine, contact sheets, and proof prints, Gordon Parks : The Making of an Argument raises important questions about the role of photography in addressing social concerns, its use as a documentary tool, and its function in the world of publishing. The book includes contributions from Susan M Taylor, The Montine McDaniel Freeman Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art ; Péter W Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation ; and Irvin Mayfield, Artistic Director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

Invisible Man
Invisible Man

Author: Michal Raz-Russo

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 9783958291096

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By the mid-1940s. Gordon Parks had cemented his reputation as a successful photojournalist and magazine photographer, and Ralph Ellison was an established author working on his first novel, Invisible Man (1952), which would go on to become one of the most acclaimed books of the twentieth century. Less well known, however, is that their vision of racial injustices, coupled with a shared belief in the communicative power of photography, inspired collaboration on two important projects, in 1948 and 1952. Capitalizing on the growing popularity of the picture press, Parks and Ellison first joined forces on an essay titled "Harlem Is Nowhere" for '48: The Magazine of the Year. Conceived while Ellison was already three years into writing Invisible Man, this illustrated essay was centered on the Lafargue Clinic, the first nonsegregated psychiatric clinic in New York City, as a case study for the social and economic conditions in Harlem. He chose Parks to create the accompanying photographs, and during the winter months of 1948, the two roamed the streets of Harlem together, with Parks photographing under the guidance of Ellison's writing. In 1952 they worked together again, on "A Man Becomes Invisible", for the August 25 issue of Life magazine, which promoted Ellison's newly released novel. Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem focuses on these two projects, neither of which was published as originally intended, and provides an in-depth look at the authors' shared vision of black life in America, with Harlem as its nerve center.

The Locusts
The Locusts

Author: Jesse Lenz

Publisher:

Published: 2020-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780578679471

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The Locusts is the first monograph by photographer and publisher Jesse Lenz. His images transport the reader to rural Ohio where his children run wild in the fields, build forts in the attic, and fall asleep surrounded by lightsabers and superheroes. The microcosmic worlds of plants, insects, animals, and children create a brooding landscape where dichotomies of nature play out in front of his growing family. The backyard becomes a labyrinth of passages as the children experience the cycles of birth and death in the changing seasons. The Locusts depicts a world in which beautiful and terrible things will happen, but offers grace and healing within the brokenness and imperfection of life.

Marking Time
Marking Time

Author: Nicole R. Fleetwood

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 067491922X

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"A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."

Our Enemies in Blue
Our Enemies in Blue

Author: Kristian Williams

Publisher: AK Press

Published: 2015-08-03

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 1849352151

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Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute's last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police "misconduct" in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed. In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn't an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today's unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, "peace keepers" have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful. Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives.